Writing Bible lessons

Work life right now is spent bouncing between literacy class, Bible translation, Bible lesson writing and spending time with the Kovol community. My goal has been that each of these tasks receives some of my focus each week. I’m aiming to push each task along a bit each day. Each one of the tasks is enormous and could take all my time for the next months, but they all need working on.

Writing evangelistic Kovol Bible lessons is a huge task. The Gospel has never been presented in the Kovol language before. Where do you start? Well, we start at the beginning. Our lessons start in Genesis 1 and tell the story of the Bible to the end. We aim to pick up the big themes of the Bible and use its narrative to teach them. Doing so has several advantages. Firstly in an oral culture like we find ourselves in stories are important. The Kovol people are used to hearing and retelling stories and using them to make points. Teaching chronologically allows us to do just that.

To do that, though, requires a pretty long and well prepared curriculum.

I decided to break the task up into writing first and then translating. Over the years I have studied the Kovol culture to figure out what key ideas drive people. How do they view the world? Why do bad things happen? What are the solutions? Where do I fit in? Now the task is to use that knowledge and apply it to lesson writing. What needs to be said and what doesn’t? What needs to be constantly repeated and what will be accepted with no misunderstanding? What are the roadblocks to faith in current Kovol thinking that need to be addressed?  Trying to  keep all this in mind has felt like a brain-bending task. So I decided to work on that first, cutting out the translation side. There’s a whole range of vocabulary that we need to discover or develop. I didn’t think I could do it all at once, so at first I just wrote in English. The end result is 47 lessons, and since it’s in English you can actually take a look if you are interested.

As I wrote, I tried to keep in mind the need to repeat things often, while trying to keep it short and sweet, while also including everything that is needed, while also weaving in Kovol themes. The end result is…. I don’t know.

I’ve been wrestling with the question of what is good enough. I feel an urgency to teach as soon as we can. How do I balance speed and quality? If I spent longer working on it would it improve? It’s based on my current understanding of Kovol culture and what is important to say, but my Kovol cultural understanding still has a long, long way to go. In 5 years, if God willing there are Kovol believers will they point at parts of what I’ve written and say, “That doesn’t really work.” If that’s the case, am I currently able to fix that? I don’t think so. So, does that mean my attitude should be to get it done quickly and plan on revisions?

For now, I’m putting a pin in it as done and I’ve started the translation process. I’ve finished 3 lessons. The translation process is similar to Bible translation, but the steps are not as stringent. The same question of speed vs quality has popped up again. I’ve written the lessons in the best Kovol I can manage and then I have read them paragraph by paragraph to language helpers to correct mistakes. Afterwards I read it to other language helpers to check it communicates. The question I’ve run into is how well does it need to communicate? Does every sentence need to be perfect? Or can I tick it as good enough if the main point is understood?

Then if the point is understood is it understood in the way I intended? For example, if my helpers can eloquently tell me all about the illustration (talk picture we say in Kovol) does that mean they understood what the comparison was actually attempting to do, or did they just catch the image? Do they catch the flow of thought between the paragraphs? I’m left wondering what the effect of the whole is.

When we teach these lessons we won’t read from a script. We’ll have the script in mind and we’ll stand up and teach. What comes out will very much depend on our language and speaking ability. How valuable is a word perfect script? I suppose the written lesson will be available afterwards for Kovol people to read at home. I still get back to the problem of me as an outsider writing in and for a language and culture that I have sketchy ability with. Yet, currently we do not have literate or believing Kovol helpers and so it has to be that way.

An encouragement that I’m on the right track is that each lesson finishes with comprehension questions. The questions cover information, like “What did God make on day 1?”. They also cover the main point, like “Is God stingy?” When I hear my helpers answering the questions correctly I’m encouraged to see that at least something is going in.

As you can see I’m left with a lot of questions. The curriculum planned out in English and the first 3/47 lessons translated is a good start though. It seems all that is left is to faithfully put the hours in and work at it. I’m aiming to get a lesson translated and checked each week. I’m encouraged when I step back and look at the big picture. The big picture being that God is using me in his work. God could have chosen a different way to do things. Angelic messengers could surely handle my difficulties without breaking a sweat. There’s any number of ways God could have done this without me, but he chose to use me. That implies a few things to me. It implies that everything is well in hand. God chose to use a sketchy tool for the job, but he’s more than able to do good work with it. It also implies that there is something valuable in the process. God is achieving something as I wrestle through these questions. He’s achieving things as I sit alongside my Kovol helpers and spending hours translating and checking. I love to measure my progress in counting lessons translated, but that misses a whole range of other things going on.

I wish I was translating faster and producing better work, but that misses the important thing. God loves people and he’s at work in people. That includes me, and the daily interactions I have with other people that God loves are far more important than ticking off the to-do list.